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Catherine, I don't know what happened to sour your opinion of PPC marketing, but it does work. I've used PPC marketing successfully on many different occasions. But there's a trick to it. You have to know what you're doing. That means you have to invest the time to master both the art and science of PPC marketing and learn how to make it work for you.

I suggest you read Perry Marshall's "Definitive Guide to Google AdWords," which is considered by many to be the bible of the various Adwords publications on the market. It will help you to improve click rates, understand which words to use for match-types, lower advertising expenses and thereby increase your overall total returns on your pay-per-click advertisements.

Dale King

I agree with you much, Dale! Most people miss the important point of PPC marketing which is it targets specific audience who are also interested in your type of business. It does become a waste of money IF you'll target the wrong kind of audience, so learn how to use PPC before using it in order not to get disappointed.

When we started our company we relied heavily on PPC advertising. It was the only way to get people to visit our site and sign up when no one had heard of us. Organic search and appearing at the top of search results takes a lot of time. We started with 100% of our leads coming from PPC and we still use it today. We are constantly tinkering with the adwords and changing our bids in order to avoid wasting money. Unfortunately there will always be wasted clicks and some of the concerns from the Original Poster are valid, but we would not be where we are today without PPC.
As we continue to grow we are working on shifting our focus away from PPC and to organic free clicks and referrals but I can say that we would not have been as successful if we didn't start out using PPC. We are already shifting budget towards our SEO efforts, blogs, videos, etc but I think we will always have some budget for PPC.

With PPC you are only paying for people interested in your site - unlike banner ads where you get paid for exposures, or direct mail where you are paying to send a message no one may read or care about.

Interesting viewpoints on both sides.
Not being very PPC literate, it raises a few of questions for me.

1). Did the people with bad experiences use any negative keywords?
2). Why didn't anyone mention negative keywords? Keywords were mentioned many times.
3). Does anyone recommend using negative keywords? I don't see very much talk about it.

I highly recommend using negative keywords for PPC. They will help prevent you from paying for traffic that is not interested in what you offer.

The best way I found to determine negative keywords is to plug your search term into google and see what comes back.

Here is an example. If I am advertising for the band named "Styx," I Do not want to pay for people searching for the mythology of Styx. When I type "Styx" into Google, I see some keywords I do not want to advertise on such as "Underworld" and "River."

Those I might have thought up on my own, but I also found a game called Styx: Master of Shadows and a website called styx-thegame. I do not want to pay for advertising when people are searching for this either, so I would also add negative keywords for "game" and "master of shadows."

This is part of the art and science of pay-per-click. You want to make sure you are only paying for the type of traffic you want.

One other thing to mention is that just because a keyword matches your site does not mean that is brings you quality traffic. I had this happen once on a baby forum I ran. I wrote an article on how to get pregnant and created a highly targeted campaign for those exact words and dropped the traffic on that article. I was literally flooded with traffic, but none of the traffic was converting to forum users. Luckily I was monitoring my site and caught it before all my spending limits were used up on it.

PPC (pay-per-click) is one of the most efficient ways for a small web based company to generate leads. With the ability to measure results precisely, target prospects in a narrow manor, and tightly manage your spending, PPC is one of the top lead generating tools at your disposal.

However, this technique does have a downside. Because PPC campaigns are so convenient and easy to set up, the small business owner can easily spend thousands of dollars before they learn some hard lessons on what works and what doesn’t.